There was a collective gasp in the academic community, particularly among her associates, when Dr. Barbara Christian died at 56 in the summer of 2000. A promising career of research and further breakthroughs in the world of contemporary literary feminism and scholarship experienced an immeasurable blow, a terrible tear in that fabric of thought only a few successors have managed to mend.
“She was a path-breaking scholar,” said Percy Hintzen, chairman of the Department of African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, upon learning of her death from cancer. “Nobody did more to bring Black women writers into academic and popular recognition.”
Christian’s arrival at such an esteemed plateau began in St. Thomas, U. S. Virgin Islands, where she was born Dec. 12, 1943. She came to the U.S. mainland at age 15 to attend Marquette University in Wisconsin. From 1965 to 1972, she taught at City College of New York. In 1970, she earned a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University.
After leaving City College, Christian was appointed an assistant professor at Berkeley and immediately played a key role in organizing the Black Studies department at the school. She chaired the department from 1978 to 1983 and subsequently chaired the Ethnic Studies doctoral program from 1986 to 1989.
Despite a workload of administrative duties, she found time to write and research extensively in Black women’s literature. Along with countless articles, she published her landmark study, “Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976,” in 1980, which was widely acclaimed. In this work, she highlighted the often ignored novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset.
In the preface of the book, Christian wrote, “In 1974, I had an opportunity to develop a course on Black women writers at the University of California at Berkeley. Black women students there were also seeking some evidence of their own history and experience in the books they were reading. So they asked that such a course be developed. In the process of researching that course, I began to see the recurrence of certain images (images I had seen before but did not fully understand) that needed some thought, some analysis. These images and reactions to them permeated the works by Black women. I found, not surprisingly that very little work had been done on the Black woman in literature and that she seldom appeared in a focal position in the Black novel.”
What she distilled in this book and her essays was shared with her students in the classroom. In the anthology “But Some of Us Are Brave—Black Women’s Studies,” edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith, there is a sample of Christian’s syllabus of a course she developed on the works of Alice Walker. Her expressed purpose she said was to define Walker’s role as a writer and a revolutionary visionary of Black feminism.
Very few seminars and symposiums on gender, race and Black feminism occurred without Christian’s presence. Her reputation expanded with the publication of “The Race for Theory,” which challenged the increasing domination of African-American literary study by theorists who seemed to displace both writers and their writing, one article noted. She wrote that she had been “convinced that there has been a takeover in the literary world by Western philosophers from the old literary elite, the neutral humanists. Philosophers have been able to effect such a takeover because so much of the literature of the West has become palled, laden with despair, self-indulgent and disconnected.”
Embarking in yet another intellectual arena didn’t minimize her concerns on campus, where she was the first African-American woman to be granted tenure at Berkeley in 1978 and the first to receive the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991. She garnered another first when she was promoted to full professor in 1986 and in the same year awarded the college’s highest honor, the Berkeley Citation.
It is simply amazing that Christian’s pioneering ideas and analysis of Black women’s literature or her theoretical conclusions have been virtually ignored by contemporary thinkers. She is at least cited in Calvin Hernton’s “The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers—Adventures in Sex, Literature and Real Life.” He places Christian in a collective category he defines “as the Oral-Poetic-Narrative Tradition of Black women.”
Interestingly, the loop of Christian’s life back to Alice Walker, who she had championed in the classroom, was renewed when Walker’s book “The Color Purple” reached the screen. Christian was among the critics, friends and associates Walker assembled to help her to decide to allow Hollywood, particularly Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg, to make a film based on the book. Most of those assembled voted against having Hollywood interpret the book, basing their decision on the industry’s travesties of the past. Christian said, “If we always refuse, how will we ever know? What will we change if we don’t take a risk?” In a letter to Christian, who at first had disliked the film, Walker wrote, “But mainly Barbara, let it go. I trust the universe on this one completely. And it—I feel—is not displeased. I know your concern is out of love for me and my work, and I love you for that. But it really is all right. Jah knows.” In a postscript, Walker added, “And don’t feel bad that you encouraged taking a chance—I’m very glad you did. But I took it, so you are not responsible.”
Taking a chance was the hallmark of Christian’s intrepid and productive life.